In certain meat processing operations, it is necessary to slice through both bone and meat. For large meat-bearing animals such as cattle and hogs, cost effectively and efficiently slicing through carcass sections having large skeletal bones has been difficult in that one or more of the following problems can frequently occur:
(a) since the compression strength of many such skeletal bones is approximately equal to that of steel, typical steel blades can fail or fracture at an unacceptable rate; PA1 (b) there may be yield loss because the thicknesses of slices can deviate unacceptably from a desired thickness due to, for example, the variations in slicing resistance between soft tissue, cartilage, dense bone, and/or vibrations within the slicing machine such as in a slicing blade. Note that such deviations can be deviations in the thicknesses between slices and/or deviations in the thickness of a single slice; PA1 (c) if the slicing blade is not appropriately aligned or has insufficient cutting characteristics (e.g. blade velocity, sharpness and thinness), then such large bones may shatter thereby producing slices of meat undesirable for premium commercial sales; and PA1 (d) an excessive amount of bone dust may be scattered across a face of sliced meat when the cutting edge is not sufficiently hardened so that it remains sharp through large numbers of cutting cycles. Moreover, if the blade has a cutting edge with teeth (such as a band saw) such teeth are typically designed for tearing or sawing off slices of meat, thus also producing bone dust.
Thus, it would be advantageous to have a bone-in meat slicing apparatus that can reliably perform high speed meat slicing operations, and cleanly slice such large skeletal bones. In particular, it would be desirable to have a meat slicer that can slice at high speeds bone-in pork loins, wherein the bones are cleanly cut, the slices have a consistent thickness, and wherein there is a substantial reduction of bone dust scattered across the cut face of the meat slices. Moreover, it would be advantageous to provide such slicing apparatus, wherein it is unnecessary to induce rigidity into the meat being sliced by freezing some portion thereof, such as the outer soft tissue layers as is required by some prior art bone-in meat slicers.